Cognitive Psychology from 35,000 Feet

1
Cognitive Psychology from 35,000 Feet

• Robert J. Mislevy
• University of Maryland
• January 31, 2005

2
Overview

• Two popular texts
• Anderson, J.R. (2000). Cognitive psychology and
  its implications. New York Worth.
• Sternberg, R.J. (1999). Cognitive psychology.
  Belmont, CA Wadsworth.
• Quick overview based on Andersons Table of
  Contents
• What well emphasize, what well skip
• Analogues from what well skip

3
The Science of Cognition

• Motivations
• For us, improved assessment learning of the
  kinds of things you learn in school and work
• The history of cog psych
• See four approaches to psychology
• Move to real-world learning since 1970s
• The nervous system
• Physiology Brain thought
• Connectionism

4
Perception

• Visual information processing
• Visual pattern recognition
• Speech recognition
• Key insight 1 What you perceive is a
  combination of the raw stimuli you see/hear/...
  and what you think you might be
  seeing/hearing/...
• Key insight 2 Some processing is automatic,
  from the bottom-up (feature detectors), but then
  patterns perceived are interactions of top-down
  bottom-up processing.

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Attention and Performance

• Auditory attention
• Visual attention (spotlight metaphor)
• A central bottleneck
• Localized systems can function simultaneously,
  but major steps are often sequential.
• Key insight Severe limits on how many things we
  can attend to at once. Automaticity and
  meaningful structures are the way out of the bind.

6
Perception-Based Knowledge Representations

• Cog psych differs strongly from behavioral psych
  in positing that there are internal
  representations of knowledge that are worked
  with. Physically they need not be like
  representations we are conscious of.
• Dual-Code theory (verbal / visual)
• Visual spatial imagery
• Representation of verbal information

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Meaning-Based Knowledge Representations

• Memory for meaningful interpretations of events
• Key insight What we remember is what we perceive
  and process--not a record of the sensory input.
• Propositional representations
• Conceptual knowledge
• Schemas
• External knowledge representations
• E.g., maps, diagrams, math notation, language

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Human Memory Encoding Storage

• Rehearsal and working memory
• Activation and long-term memory
• Recency Frequency Spreading activation
• Practice and strength
• Factors affecting memory
• Depth of processing
• Meaningful vs nonmeaningful
• Intentional vs. incidental

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Human Memory Retention Retrieval

• The retention function
• Interference effects
• Retrieval inference
• What we remember is partly what we infer from
  what we remember.
• Associative structure retrieval
• Implicit vs. explicit memory

10
Problem-Solving

• Procedural knowledge and problem solving
• Procedural knowledge originates in
  problem-solving activity in which a goal is
  decomposed into subgoals for which the
  problem-solvers possesses operators.
• Problem representation
• Representing a problem is 80 of solving it.
• Set effects
• Connects with sociocultural perspective

11
Development of Expertise

• Stages of skill acquisition
• Cognitive Conscious, discrete, laborious
• Associative Integration
• Autonomous Automaticity
• The nature of expertise
• Transfer
• Educational implications (ITSs)

12
Reasoning and Decision-Making

• Reasoning about conditionals and qualifiers
• Deductive, Inductive, Abductive reasoning
• Well look at this in some detail with Bayes nets
• Decision making
• Everyday reasoning vs. normative / formal
  reasoning
• Cognitive illusions are like optical illusions
• e.g., representativeness post hoc ergo proctor
  hoc

13
Language Structure

• Linguistics
• Syntactic formalisms
• Much (exactly what?) of language is wired in to
  humans
• Relationship between language thought
• The Whorfian hypothesis
• Language acquisition
• Language assessment implications

14
Language Comprehension

• Parsing
• Bottom-up but lots of top-down
• Joint use of phonological, lexical, syntactic,
  semantic, pragmatic, and social information.
• Utilization
• Text processing
• Kintsch van Dijks model of comprehension
• Pinker, S. (2000). The Language Instinct How
  the Mind Creates Language. Harper.

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Individual Differences in Cognition

• Cognitive development
• Piaget, Siegler, Case -- esp.cognitive
• Vgotsky, Lave -- esp.sociocultural
• Psychometric studies of cognition
• Our focus will be on learning rather than skills
  and aptitudes, but we will use machinery and
  concepts from psychometrics

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Conclusion

• Our focus is on learning that is conscious,
  semantically rich, not wired in
• Emphasis therefore on knowledge structures,
  problem-solving, representations, contextual
  aspects of learning knowledge
• Less on perception, language, physiology
• We are interested in implications for assessment
• What we want to be able to say about students
  knowledge, the kinds of things we need to see,
  situations that evoke the relevant evidence.